What Cannot Be Lost--October 20, 2023

What Cannot Be Lost--October 20, 2023

"I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you." [Jeremiah 31:3]

You want to know the secret to how God's love can keep on enduring with us?  Here it is:  God's kind of love doesn't depend on our worthiness, action, or earning.  The unconditionality of God's love makes it unfailing, because God's willingness to keep loving us doesn't depend on how well we keep up our side of the deal.  Our goodness or badness, our loveliness or unloveliness, and even our awareness or ignorance of being loved, all factor out of the equation, and that leaves God free to continue to love the world, even in spite of the world's lovelessness.  In other words, even when we get ourselves in deep trouble and find ourselves in the pain of bearing the consequences of our worst choices and most terrible actions, we can't shake God's love for us.  It doesn't run out of energy or lose its grip on us, and it doesn't fade out, burn out, or give out.  Face it, we can't lose it--not even if we tried.

When I hear these words from the book of Jeremiah, I hear a song.  There's this gorgeous song of Sara Groves that just brought me to a halt the first time I heard it, years ago, and it is simply called, "You Cannot Lose My Love."  You could hear it as a parent's song to a child or as God's song to us, and I suppose that's part of the beauty of how love works--that there is a common thread of unconditionality to genuine love wherever it is found.  The verses all have the same pattern: listing off things that can be lost in this life, and then the assertion by contrast that the singer's love cannot be lost.  "You will lose your baby teeth, at times you'll lose your faith in me; you will lose a lot of things, but you cannot lose my love," goes the first verse.  Or, "You will lose your confidence, in times of trial your common sense, you may lose your innocence, but you cannot lose my love."  You get the idea, right?

I love that honesty about how many other things are indeed losable in this life--and how it makes God's love, real love, stand out.  Genuine love, whether God's for us or the best examples of our love for one another, endures and cannot be lost.  Our commitments to each other are not merely, "I will love you as long as it is easy," but rather, "I will seek your good even when it is difficult," because that's how God's love for us endures, too.  When Jeremiah first spoke these words on God's behalf, it was to people staring down exile, and facing the stark reality of having lost just about everything else in their lives: their homes, their kingdom, their Temple, and their sense of stability in the world.  But even in the face of all that loss, God's voice comes like the song: "I have loved you with an everlasting love."  It's as if God is saying, "You may well have lost all those things, but you cannot lose my love."  It's why Paul could say, centuries later to the Romans, that "there is nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God."  God's love sticks it out with us even when we lose everything else; the promise was never that because God loves us, nothing bad would ever happen, but that God's love would hold on to us even through those times of loss.

And again, that's possible because God doesn't put strings on divine love making it dependent on our behavior, our offerings, our piety, or our prayers.  It's just there, like a parent's for a child, because they are in the world.  

It's worth telling that to each other: to our children and grandchildren, to our fellow church folks, to the face in the mirror, and to people waiting to hear that they, too, are beloved.  I was just hearing someone share their faith story the other day, and it hit me again.  This person was mentioning a childhood full of trauma and no background in the church, and they grew up thinking that there would be no place in organized religion for them and anybody else who felt like an outcast they way they did.  (And to be honest, in a lot of gatherings of Respectable Religious People, they already had been told there was no place for them.)  But what made the difference was meeting someone who told them that they were beloved already, unconditionally, and irrevocably, by God.  And that was backed up by actions from people in that congregation who actually lived the welcome and love.  So now, this person who had been feeling left out, like all this God stuff wasn't for them, has come to faith, been baptized, and become the most amazingly involved person in their congregation--all because someone actually dared to say what Jeremiah was saying thousands of years ago: to speak on behalf of God, "I have loved you with an everlasting love," and to mean it through their actions.

I can't help but think that God is sending each of us today, like the prophet Jeremiah, to go find people who feel like they've lost everything and are ready to be disappointed by God, too, and to be for them the good news of love that endures.  There are folks we'll cross paths with who waiting to hear, and then to see us back up in our actions, the news that God's love cannot be lost, and neither can ours.  Who will we tell?  How will we show them the unconditional and unfailing love of God... through our own love?

Lord God, use us today so that someone else will know and believe your everlasting love for them.